![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Ludo is undoubtedly the focus of discussions of “genius” in this novel. She works from home in a minimum-wage job, digitizing the archives of niche magazines like Carpworld and answering with near-angelic patience the increasingly loud and persistent questions of her “Boy Wonder” son, Ludo. Sibylla is a single-mother living in a draughty London flat she can’t always afford to heat. Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai emphasizes this in the expectations it sets up surrounding a child genius, his mother, and his father/potential fathers. ![]() Male professors are more than three times as likely to be described as “geniuses” by their students than female professors, and, at the other end of the spectrum, parents are more than twice as likely to conduct an internet search for the phrase “is my son a genius” than “is my daughter a genius.” These gendered expectations surrounding genius underpin its social construction: we perceive genius based on particular biases rather than from a purely objective stance. The “ sexism of genius” has been well studied and widely reported. ![]()
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